The analog revolution of the digital technology

Tellef Kvifte

University of Oslo

Introduction

In the context of music and music production, the distinction between analog and digital sound recording, and instruments, is fundamental. The development from the analog to the digital technologies is (rightly) seen as a major revolution affecting all aspects of music making and production, a process that is often seen as a ’digital revolution’ in some way. The key concepts of ’digital’ and ’analog’, however, are not always used in a well-defined way. The concept of ’digital’, for example, sometimes seems to mean ’modern’, ’up-to-date’ or even ’machine’. We also find it in more muddy concepts like ’digital aesthetics’ that purportedly can characterise any expression made with digital media. Even more uncertain are the implications of expressions like the ”digital age” or ”digital era”, perhaps except when used simply to mean ’internet’. What we see, is that many authors use the concept to describe cultural and aesthetic phenomena rather than the inner workings of technical equipment. Cultural and aesthetic expressions made with the help of digital technology are argued to be in some sense ’digital’ in themselves, or, at least, to have some loosely defined properties caused by a digital technology. Similarly, the concept ’analog’ may be used to characterise almost any aspect of all technologies that do not include computers. Such use of the concepts digital and analog tends, in my opinion, to blur their basic meaning, and, at the same time hint at other meanings that are not well defined, but implicitely loaded with value judgements for good and bad, depending on the author’s particular preferences. To use the concepts ’analog’ and ’digital’ to characterize musical expression, however, is not the same as to characterize the technology that is used to produce it, and it is not necessarily so that digital technology used in some part of a technical production chain automatically leads to a digital musical expression. In this paper, I will try to clarify how the concept pair analog/digital may be meaningfully applied to the musical expression. Further, I will, on the basis of this, maintain that the driving factor in the recent development of music technology is not the ’digital’ in the technology, but, on the contrary, the artistic drive for control over analog aspects of the musical expression. The way I will use the concepts to describe musical expressions, is also in line with a school of communication research lead by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. One of the more obvious points made by him, is that most, if not all, communication systems have both analog and digital aspects. Another, not quite so obvious point, is that digital communication is mostly concerned with factual information, while the analog parts of the communication is mostly concerned with relations, and therefore — according to Bateson — the most important part of the communication.

The Concepts

The basic meaning of the analog/digital-distinction is no doubt well-known to all of you: An analog signal is continuous; a digitzed version of it is a series of discrete symbols signifying the strength of the analog signal at discrete intervals in time. This basic sense of analog-as-continous and digital-as-discrete, is found in the opening of Davies’ fine paper on the history of sampling from 1996: ”Most people are unaware that our current transition from analogue to digital technology is the second stage in a development that began around the middle of the last century, culminating in the mid-1870s. Up to then all communications had been digital. . . for example the electric telegraph and Morse code as well as much older non-electrical systems like semaphore and Native American smoke signals. It was the virtual simultaneous invention of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell) and the phonograph (Thomas Alva Edison) that ushered in a century of analogue technology.” (Davies 1996:3; my emphasis). The connection between Morse code and digital technology may not be obvious if one is used to the confusing and general ways the concept is used today, but it follows quite easily from the basic meaning of the concept. Bateson’s usage of the terms is not far from Davies’, and he too writes about communication processes in a wider sense than a purely technical. He writes for instance: How does it happen that the paralinguistics and kinesics of men from strange cultures, and even the paralinguistics of other terrestrial mammals, are at least partly intelligible to us, whereas the verbal languages of men from strange cultures seem to be totally opaque? (372) As Bateson puts it, verbal language is a digital system, where “the signs themselves have no simple connection. . . with what they stand for. The numeral ’5’ is not bigger than the numeral ’3’...” (p 373), while paralingustics and kinesics — or ’non-verbal communiaction’ is an analog communication, where ”the magnitude of the gesture, the loudness of the voice, the length of the pause, the tension of the muscle, and so forth — these magnitudes commonly correspond (directly or inversely) to magnitudes in the relationship that is the subject of discourse.“ In other words, you may understand that a man is angry from the volume and tone of his voice, even if you don’t understand the meaning of the expletives he is using. This example is not arbitrary — one of Bateson’s main points is that the analog communication is understandable across cultures, and even to some extent across species — and that it is mainly concerned with relationships, with love, hate, respect, fear, dependency etc. We will have to return to this last point later.

The musical parameters

Let us turn to music — that is, music as music, and not merely as represented by a pressure wave in air, or an electric signal in a wire. The concepts of analog and digital are easily applied in a similar way here. Take the parameter of pitch: It is a well-defined digital system of discrete entities; the note ’c’ is a distinct entity, clearly different from a ’c-sharp’, and there are no intermediate possibilities — a note is either a ’c’ or a ’c-sharp’. This is not to say that there are no intermediate frequencies between these two notes, but any sounding frequency in between will — to the musical listener — be assigned to either of the categories ’c’ or ’c-sharp’, possibly with the modification ’too sharp’ or ’slightly out of tune’. But ’sharpness’ and ’outof- tune-ness’ are analog entities in the sense that we do not have a system of discrete values for them, they can vary continuously in a more-or-lessway. The step-wise differences of named pitches form a digital system; the continuous pitch variations in out-of-tune-ness, vibrato and glissandi are analog variations. A nice illustration of these two aspects is this excerpt from a recording with an opera singer -regardless the prominent analog pitch variations, we are still able to assign digital categories of scale steps to what we hear: [Sound ex. Flagstad] Similar considerations can be applied to other parameteres of music: the time dimension is partly codified in a digital system of the discrete units of whole, half, quarter, eights etc.; at the same time, we know that small variations in the timing — variations that are not codified in a system of discrete recognizable units — are important for the rhythmic feeling, timing or groove of the music. Timbre, though far less codified than pitch and time, is also used in both digital and analog ways: the timbres of the different instruments in a symphony orchestra is one example; the clarinet having a distinct timbre from a trumpet and a violin. At the same time, a clarinet may vary gradually in timbre within some limits, in a way that is not possible to describe in a system of discrete units. We may note that standard music notation is mainly concerned with digital aspects of music, like the discrete pitches of the scale system, the discrete classes of durational values of whole, half and quarter notes, and classes of loudness like ff, f, p and pp. Analog parameters can not be described in any useful detail in such notation — rhythmic feel, groove, exact intonation, the way a tone is shaped dynamically — these are not what standard notation is for. Notation is, accordingly, mainly concerned with structure: factual information about how pitches and durations are organized. If we turn to the discourse of analog parameters, we find that this is to a large extent concerned with either expression or competence (or both), which — as Bateson would be quick to point out — is of course usually about some kind of relationship between human beings. The emphasis placed by professional musicians on being able to play ’in time’ and ’in tune is one example; another is found in the many hits you get on the internet if you search on the three keywords ’pitch’, ’correction’ and ’cheating’. Also works like Eric Clarke’s studies of ’expressive timing’ and Charlie Keil’s work on so-called participatory discrepancies and groove, point to the analog parameters as carriers of expressive information in musical performance. If we look at the recent developments in music technology through the glasses of the concepts analog and digital, it seems obvious that increased control over analog aspects of music is a key factor. Let us start with the MiniMoog — an obvious example as it is universally seen as one of the more important milestones in recent music technology. Compared to an acoustic keyboard instrument, like a piano, the most obvious difference — apart from the size — is the far greater number of controls on the Moog. If I have counted right, there are 45 controls beside the keyboard here. Of these, 19 are digital controls, either on-off-switches, or switches that select between clearly defined alternatives, like the octave range of the oscillators. That leaves us with 26 analog controls, that in different ways may affect pitch and timbre. Compared to acoustic instruments, this is an unheard of number of analog controls, and the MiniMoog is accordingly capable of far-reaching analog timbral variations. Notice also the pitch bend — an analog control for analog pitch, not found on acoustic keyboard instruments. There is a paralell development in recording technology. The development of the concept of multitrack recording might be seen also as a means for controlling analog aspects of music; especially timbral qualities. A great number of the controls on an ordinary mixing console are dedicated to various aspects of analog timbral control, like EQ and amount of different types of effects. The separation of the different instruments on a recording, made possible by multitracking, also opens for detailed control of other analog parameters, like intonation. Such controls are available in great quantities in recording software, like ProTools, Cubase, Logic, Live, Digital Performer etc. In addition, this kind of software offers many possibilities for controlling the analog aspects of rhythm and timing, like quantizing, humanizing, tweaking of so-called swing parameters, and slight temporal shifting of single tracks. Also relevant is software for construction and modification of loops, sometimes part of recording software packages like in Live; sometimes standalone applications like ReCycle. Here, the basic idea is to understand short sound recordings in the digital terms of bars and beats, while at the same time have analog — gradual — control over the exact timing of different parts of the sound file, thus being able to control the rhythmic feeling or groove of the sound. This may be used in different contexts, like the construction of drum loops, or to repair or ’regroove’ parts of recorded tracks in a multitrack setting. This emphasis on the analog parameteres of music in technology is also evident if we regard the development of music in the last part of the previous century. There is no really significant difference in digital aspects: No new scale system, no radically new organisation of pitches, like for instance Schoenberg’s system from earlier in the century; no radically new rhythmic system -still whole notes, half notes, quarter notes; no radically new rhythms either, but may be incorporation of a somewhat wider range of grooves. On the other hand, there are enourmous differences in analog qualities, in the shaping of timbres, of the spatial qualities shaped with different kinds of reverbs, of dynamic qualities shaped with both automation of faders and compressors, and of rhythmic qualities shaped by loop software, simple track shifting and quantizing and humanizing tricks. Yes, I said ’tricks’, and not ’techniques’. Not because I mean that quantization — or pitch correction — is really cheating, but because this is a question that has been discussed frequently in connection with recording technology, multitracking and effect processing throughout the history of recording. It is tempting to see this question in connection with another of Bateson’s points: He holds that analog communication is largely unconscious, because relations are too important to be easily available to conscious manipulation. Therefore, situations where people start to be explicit about your non-verbal communication — for instance by making verbal remarks about your body posture, your quality of voice, etc — are usually felt to be quite uncomfortable. But there is some ambivalence here. We can easily and comfortably admire masters of manipulation of analog communication, like actors, who do precisely this for a living, at least when we encounter them in their professional settings. However, when we feel that a person is simply ’acting’ in a normal social context, by for instance simulating a particularly friendly tone of voice but not really meaning it, we feel it is not right, and ’cheating’ may be one of the words we would like to apply. And it is precisely this kind of argument that is made in connection with for instance pitch correction: By manipulating parts of the analog communication, namely pitch control, one manages to give a false impression of one’s status and personality. To repeat myself: I do not necessarily see pitch correction as cheating. I rather think the interesting question is why pitch correction is cheating to some people, and not to others, and — as part of this — when in the development of the technology it ceases to be cheating. In this connection, I find Bateson’s views useful for further discussion. Given all the incantations of the word ’digital’ in descriptions of contemporary culture and cultural technology, one gets the impression that ’digital’ is somehow a driving factor in the technological and cultural development, a factor that is seen as good or bad depending on your personal viewpoint. I have argued that, on the contrary, that the driving factor, at least in contemporary music technology, is the wish for detailed control over analog aspects of the artistic expression. One argument for my view, compared to the competing view of the digital as the driving force, is that the ’digital’ can not explain the development of another key concept of modern music production, namely the multitrack recording. As I see it, the important aspect of multitracking is precisely the detailed control over analog parameters made possible by the separation of sound sources, and the idea of multitracking is a necessary requirment for many of the digital techniques that were developed later. In fact, many of the techniques used to shape the sound on a modern music production are possible to implement with analog technology, but not without the multitrack.

Conclusion

To sum up, then, I have argued that the concepts of analog and digital are useful also in the description of musical expressions, and not only as descriptions of the underlying technology. However, the concepts need to be defined properly, and not just used to describe cultural expressions that are produced by technology that uses digital components at some points. But properly used, the concepts may give insights into the elusive processes of interaction between technology, artists and their social and economic context.

Copyright 2018 Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production